Elon Musk offers 44 billion dollars for Twitter, has he bitten off more than he can chew?

By: Alicia Chen

Elon Musk had offered a sum of 44 billion dollars to but Twitter, but he decided to cease the deal, as Twitter cannot give him enough information of how many spam and fake accounts there are. The original agreement included a 1-billion-dollar breakup fee.

One month after Musk offered to buy Twitter, he said that the deal was “temporarily on hold” as he was waiting on data for spam and fake accounts. Musk asked for evidence that these spam and fake accounts made up less than 5 percent of it’s total accounts.

Elon’s lawyer said in a letter filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that Twitted refused to provide this information or was unable to provide this information.

The letter states, “Sometimes Twitter ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that seem to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information.”

Twitter has a problem with bots, though. It admitted that it removes up to one million spam accounts every day. Spam accounts are meant to spread information quickly to large masses of people and can sometimes affect how people behave on the social platforms.

Elon Musk stated that he thought 20 percent of Twitter’s accounts were spam accounts, but when he tried to get the information, he had gotten denied many times.

Even though Musk wants to back out of this deal, he might not be able to back off at this stage. Twitter could sue him and force him to buy the company, even if it might not be worth it as the stock market prices for tech companies had plummeted in the past few months.

Had Elon Musk offered too much money?